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Lexus dreams flying cars, builds hoverboard prototype

Thu., June 25, 2015

Watch out, world. Toyota is heading back to the future.

The automaker has hinted it’s looking into flying cars. Now its Lexus luxury brand has actually built a working model of a hoverboard. That’s right, an actual working hoverboard. It’s real, but not for sale. Yet.

A prototype model of a floating "hoverboard", like the one used in the "Back To The Future" film franchise, from Toyota's luxury car brand Lexus, pictured in Barcelona, Spain. (TOYOTA MOTOR / AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

Toyota's luxury car brand Lexus says it has created a prototype that glides frictionlessly just above the ground with technology similar to that used in maglev trains. Testing of the hoverboard will take place in Barcelona, Spain over the coming weeks. (TOYOTA MOTOR / AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

The board uses liquid nitrogen-cooled superconductors and magnets, according to the Lexus website. The technology is already zooming around Toyota’s home country. A Japanese railway company last year set a new world speed record using a magnetic-levitation train. Toyota tipped its hand a year ago that it’s been experimenting with this for cars.

“It’s very confidential information but we have been studying the flying car in our most advanced R&D area,” Hiroyoshi Yoshiki, a managing officer in Toyota’s Technical Administration Group, had said in June 2014 at the Bloomberg Next Big Thing Summit in Sausalito, Calif. “Flying car means the car is just a little bit away from the road, so it doesn’t have any friction or resistance from the road.”

It’s been 30 years since the first Back to the Future movie was released, and Marty McFly only hopped on a hoverboard to evade his pursuers in the second installment released in 1989. Lexus plans to start testing the prototype in Barcelona this summer, and is looking forward to a special date coming up that ties in with the films.

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Lexus says it will disclose more information further down the road—specifically on Oct. 21, 2015, the day Doc, Marty and his girlfriend Jennifer went back to the future. But really, roads? Where they’re going, they won’t need roads.

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